IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act(prestonbyrne.com) |
IP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act(prestonbyrne.com) |
He can’t seem to decide if Ofcom’s position is that the geo blocking was disabled or that it’s not sufficient. He seems to flip flop between the two positions throughout the post.
This is really strange because he cites Ofcom’s statement! How can he not know what they’re investigating after he’s been told!
In addition, he seems under the impression that Samaritans (a suicide prevention charity) are either a part of Ofcom or if they’re a pro censorship pressure group.
Lesser issues are that he doesn’t understand the government operates out of Whitehall, not Westminster (which is Parliament) and that Parliament can put pressure on government organisations but ultimately it’s independent so Parliament and the government can only ask Ofcom to investigate (outside of passing legislation).
In addition, such an inference flies in the face of the fact that Ofcom have sent staff to conferences for pornographic websites to talk to them about compliance: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/sep/21/were-here-to...
I do not give a single solitary fuck what any Briton thinks of any American exercising their constitutional rights
If the American is lawfully exercising their rights, and the Briton has a reason to censor them, the American is right and the Briton is wrong
No exceptions
This probably sounds "cool" and correct to his supporters but this gung-ho black-and-white approach is hiding an important nuance:
The framing above (UK undermining US law) can immediately be reversed. The UK has laws (that we may disagree with) that are being undermined by US actors.
That's the nature of the internet, and the reason this is a complicated issue to resolve, not helped by showboating lawyers.
Well colour me surprised by that opinion
That's typical. What's their real target then, anti-Israel content like in the US TikTok forced-sale?
It's all total madness, and it's not just the UK there are even more crazy regulations coming from the EU. China, and others in Asia are well known for regulating too. A mess.
The First Amendment was created to protect against foreign governments impeding on your speech?
I feel like that's really missing the point of what this amendment is about, at a time when the First Amendment is at greatest threat from the current US government.
That means we defend every site, however small or controversial it may be, from foreign attempts to infringe on their constitutional rights. It means not giving up so much as an inch of ground without a major fight, if those are the instructions. It means we must not ever lose.
--
That is a powerful pro-bono defense message by the US person doing it.
Just like the Trump says climate crisis is a hoax and wins elections, can't somebody in the UK say Online Safety Act is nonsense and win election and repeal it?
>The UK regulator has now publicly confirmed that the “mirror” site for my client’s site is not accessible in the UK.
The writer then proceeds to describe the way in which the spinning up of a mirror lead to the site becoming available for people in the UK. And the author protests that:
>The reasons why SaSu had a mirror are SaSu’s alone/none of Ofcom’s fucking business; [...]
The way it is written makes for a string suspicion that SaSu thought they could obviate OSA with a cheeky mirror (standard fare for torrent sites - who also wish to bypass censorship - I gather) and got caught. I can't see why else the author would be so vociferous, nor how the mirror wouldn't block the very same UK addresses as the main-site except by design.
Suicide is illegal here (there is movement on this, thankfully). Helping people do illegal things, also illegal. Facilitating such help, also illegal. There seems no need to stoop to imagining some weird conspiracy or blaming a cabal of shadowy figures.
I guess you could think of it like we treat helping people kill themselves like USA treats UK people facilitating copyright infringement.
Even if you hate how this guy writes, which I can agree is questionably professional at times. There's no real way to read this other than that Ofcom, instead of simply complaining that an IP wasn't geoblocked correctly, took the first opportunity they could find to restart their extraterritorial attack on SaSu. All that to avoid the presumably incredibly bad optics of implementing a GFW. Although honestly I would be the least surprised if the UK implemented a GFW soon.
What's all the business about the mirror and the 'the mirror is none of your business' prose - which sounds very much like 'do not look behind the curtain'.
It really sounds a lot like the reason the gov 'went after' SaSu was they brought up a mirror that didn't block the UK access in the manner of the principle site. But I can't see how that's verifiable for us.
This (attempted circumvention of the block with a mirror; like pirate sites do) seems more likely to me than it being a vendetta; perhaps you have more info that would suggest otherwise?
If the UK wants to go full totalitarian it’s alright, they can even consider me a criminal or ban me from entering the country.
I usually avoid traveling to countries doing non sense or that would arrest me for ideological reasons.
The UK would be no different.
But as far as I know, where I live, I am not under UK’s jurisdiction.
They should just hand it back to the king, the democracy experiment has failed there.
Take this case: the law was enacted two years ago by a different government, the regulator follows the law as enacted, and yet no one cares about this little nuance.
In reality, it's a decent technocratic government trying to reverse a decade of mismanagement and fighting about five hundred fires at the same time. It's OK to good.
Democracy: everyone's somehow smarter than everyone else.
Like bees to honey
Edit: I appreciate the down votes but research him, he has never participated in a real case. He is not a practicing lawyer by any real measure.
Of course it's not literally 'violating the First Amendment', but it sure seems like the kind of thing the writers of Constitution would have tried to protect against if they knew it could happen someday.
That's not how "enthusiastic support" looks like: https://votes.parliament.uk/votes/commons/division/1416
I think it'll be depressing as hell, but I don't know if "an internet with borders" is really as big a death sentence as I'd like it to be, or if we just got unusually lucky with the internet lasting as it has so long and the other way will be what people 200 years from now consider the sane approach leading to the most success. Time will tell, in the meantime the only thing I know is it's depressing for me to think about.
Labour & Lib Dems may have voted against the exact text presented to the house on a number of occasions, but it's well documented that they not only supported the general principle of the bill but wanted it to go further.
https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2023-09-12/debates/818...
>I agree with the Minister that this is a groundbreaking Bill, but we must be clear that there are still gaps.
- Debbie Abrahams (Labour)
It was obvious from the minute that idiots started creating IP location databases in the first place that people would demand that they be used like that... and those demands seem to be winning out.
What was known and not said when Parliament might have outlawed smoking in Paris is that there was literally nothing they could do to enforce such a law. Today the governments have options, hence the fight here. And many other places.
Basically all countries take that position legally. But there are norms and customs about how often you exercise it (as well as practical questions of power).
Extraterritorial regulation of Web sites is unfortunately in the process of being established as normal, but it's a bad norm. Not as bad as drone striking anybody who lights a cigarette in Paris (which could be made legal), but a bad norm nonetheless.
PS The UK doesn't have free speech and never has. Free Speech was invented by the Dutch and the US was the first to put it in a founding document.
PPS I know of no government that thinks it can enforce their law outside of their borders against foreigners. That is outside the definition of sovereignty and something the UK government seems to have invented lately.
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the entire founding political mythology of the United States is pretty much "The Parliament of the UK tried to regulate our freedom of speech without even giving us a vote, and that was intolerable." Specifically, the Stamp Act was seen as suppressing the right of the American colonies to engage in political speech. (This wasn't the only reason for the Revolutionary War, but it's one of the ones we still remember. We remember it in part because laws regulating the publishers of political pamphlets get complained about in political pamphlets.)
This isn't a political issue in the normal sense. It's more like Guy Fawkes and the "gunpowder treason and plot." The one thing that the "Tea Party" and the "No Kings" protestors can probably still agree about is that the Stamp Act was bad, because this issue is part of the fundamental political mythology of the country. "The British Parliament does not get to regulate our speech" is right up there with "The President does not get to wear a crown."
This is not a fight that the UK government can actually win, not in the long run. Any US politician who allows Parliament to regulate the speech of a US citizen will find themselves in the awkward position of British politician who proposed a national monument to Guy Fawkes. Allowing this is "Un-American" in these sense that it goes almost directly against our founding patriotic mythology and symbolism.
The UK should just accept the geo-IP block of the UK as a compromise, and walk away. This particular fight isn't worth it. Trust me on this.
We need to re-imagine the Parisian as an individual with exceptionally long arms lighting the tip of their cigarette in London...
I'm not entirely sure if you yourself understand the context or real meaning of that phrase, but for others at least, it was NOT meant to highlight that Parliament has a burning desire or real ability to legislate outside of its jurisdiction!
Just that it has the legal authority to create any such law, and that the legitimacy of a law is not dependent on its moral content. It's merely a paraphrasing/summary of H.L.A. Hart's legal positivism.
More democratically-elected legislatures ought to say, “We don't give a shit about what our predecessors agreed to.” when it comes to treaties requiring restrictions on their own citizens.
I don't think that's true at all. You be taking payment by credit card, which doesn't require you to have any local presence.
I think your bigger risk is that you get a judgement made against you by a UK court, which a court that has jurisdiction over you is willing to enforce. I'm not sure under what circumstances that is the case, but I believe that it being the case with libel judgements has been an issue for a while (since plaintiffs can 'forum shop').
I broadcast radio from my country, according to the rules of my country. If you tune in, and your country doesn't like it, they can enforce on you or broadcast something else on the same frequency if that's allowed by their rules.
This is quite obviously incorrect. I am a UK citizen, but live in the US. No company needs a UK presence to collect money from me.
You only have to have presence in the UK if you do some larger-scale commercial activity there (like X/Twitter), but of course you can easily sell goods and services to UK citizens without all that. But sites like 4cahn and SaSu don't even sell anything at all.
Please downvote the parent comment into oblivion.
Will the US embassy get involved? Of course. Will they get you released? Maybe, but it's not guaranteed. And you are in for a bad time regardless.
Source: https://gdpr.eu/companies-outside-of-europe/
1. This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data in the context of the activities of an establishment of a controller or a processor in the Union, regardless of whether the processing takes place in the Union or not.
2. This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data of data subjects who are in the Union by a controller or processor not established in the Union, where the processing activities are related to:
(a) the offering of goods or services, irrespective of whether a payment of the data subject is required, to such data subjects in the Union; or
(b) the monitoring of their behaviour as far as their behaviour takes place within the Union.
3. This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data by a controller not established in the Union, but in a place where Member State law applies by virtue of public international law.
I read the article and I remain confused.
I've just come to this story after seeing it on HN so I might have misunderstandings from being unaware of the background. Also, I neither reside in the US nor UK so I'd have not seen local media reports.
In short, I gather UK's Ofcom is threatening a US web site for online content that is lawful within the US's jurisdiction and unlawful in the UK as it contravenes the UK's Online Safety Act.
I am bewildered that Preston Byrne has even bothered to acknowledge Ofcom's correspondence let alone respond to it as the UK (Ofcom) has no jurisdiction over actions of any entity or person within the continental US—or for that matter the actions of those outside its borders unless, say, covered by treaty, etc.
That Preston Byrne responded to Ofcom seems strange given the fact that he is not only a lawyer but also head of legal and compliance at Arkham law firm, thus he ought to be aware that is client is shielded from UK law by virtue that the UK has no jurisdiction on US territory.
If I'd been Byrne I'd not have even acknowledged Ofcom's correspondence with a 'fuck off/cease and desist' reply but filed it in the trash can. (If there's some mitigating matter I've missed here let me know.)
It's clear to me the the UK's Online Safety Act stops at its borders so the UK has full responsibility for blocking websites that are physically outside its jurisdiction, similarly blocking or stopping its citizens from accessing accessing them.
It seems to me many of the younger internet fraternity are unaware that there's longstanding precedent for how such matters are handled. Back in the days of the Cold War before the internet some countries used to broadcast propaganda on HF/shortwave radio bands to those that were their political enemies and recipient countries would attempt to jam the broadcasts so their citizens would not be able to listen to them. For example, Communist USSR, China etc. would jam the BBC or the US's VOA (Voice of America).
Simply, if a country did not want its citizens to listen to the broadcasts of another country it was its responsibility to jam the incoming signals. It seems to me all that has actually changed since then is that nowady the unwanted broadcasts come via internet circuits.
Frankly, Ofcom has an unmitigated hide to threaten people who are acting lawfully within the US. That said, it's not unexpected, in recent decades the UK's been acting like a petulant bully, it seems to have forgotten that without it's empire it can no longer enforce its bullyboy tactics.
BTW, the matter of what content is or is not acceptable online is completely separate issue from Ofcom's behavior. Personally, from what I've gathered I'd find content on the SaSu website unacceptable and I can understand why many in the UK want it blocked but bypassing another country's sovereign authority is not the correct way to go about it.
I think it's important to fight these sort of things even in cases where they can't actually enforce it. For one thing, say one of the site operators in question have a need or desire to visit the UK at some point in the future, but can't, because there's some sort of legal judgment against them because of this. That would be a shitty situation.
On top of that, ignoring these sorts of things also ignores possible efforts by the UK to convince other governments (like the US) to adopt similar laws, or at least agree to some level of extra-territorial enforcement. Fighting these cases sends a signal to everyone involved. You mention the UK acting like a petulant bully: yes, sometimes a good way to counteract a bully is to ignore them, but other times it's good to fight back, even when the current bullying wouldn't be effective... because future kinds of bullying might be.
Preston is not a legitimate lawyer and has never actually represented anyone. He only larps as an expert and spends an inordinate amount of time constantly trying to tell other lawyers how wrong they are, using his black-and-white god complex attitude.
Not defending UK's idiotic laws, but this doesn't hold. If you cannot regulate websites outside of the country of origin, then no internet regulation can hold for any subject. Openly selling stolen personal credentials or botnet usage? Piracy? Reselling personal information without disclosure?
So there are effectively three options for internet regulation;
- Require websites to operate region by region with IP blocks for any non-target market. This is much of EU law is applied. If you put an effort to not serve EU costumers, you can skip following EU rules. "comply or leave"
- Any country can regulate any website regardless of origin, like the UK seems to push for. This is an insane proposal and could easily create geopolitical disputes. Great firewall and banning VPNs would be the only proper way to achieve what they seem to aim for.... which i wouldn't put past them by now.
- Give up regulating the internet entirely. Some level of regulation is valuable so I don't think this will ever work. There are simply some things illegal and deplorable enough to require laws.
No Internet regulation can hold extraterritorially. You leave out the obvious and most important case: the country where the Web site or whatever is located enforcing its own laws. Which is actually how all law has mostly worked from day one.
> Openly selling stolen personal credentials or botnet usage? Piracy? Reselling personal information without disclosure?
If you find a jurisdiction where those are all legal, then I guess you just have to block your citizens from reaching it, or punish them if they do. Not particularly tricky.
It can, but instead of forcing other people to follow your laws, you have to block your country's residents from accessing the sites that break your laws.
I'm not saying I love this method either (China is famously very good at it, and I don't think their methods foster a healthy society), but I believe it should be the only lever you have. Forcing people outside your jurisdiction to follow your laws is a violation of another country's sovereignty.
As an aside, should I take pains to ensure any website I operate follows the laws of North Korea? Iran? China? Russia? Should we be complacent and accepting if HN were to be targeted by any of those governments because people here have undoubtedly said unflattering things about the leaders of those countries?
Of course not. But even though we're talking about a "friend"-type country here, it's not any different.
It would need to be set up by an extremely powerful country, either the US or an alliance of smaller countries through international treaty.
It would work as follows:
There'd be a "naughty list." Anybody on the list would be arrested upon entering a participating country. This would include past or current company employees (if employed after the listing date). Companies from participating countries would be prohibited from interacting with listed organizations in any way, under treat of sanctions. This would include VPN, cloud and hosting companies, ISPs, domain registrars, email hosts, payment processors and ad networks. This would provide basic site blocking.
Foreign companies wouldn't be subject to the sanctions, but participating countries would also put them on the list.
Good
You’re not going to extradite US site operators, period. Find another approach.
But it's the edges that get you.
I moved home a few years back, connected a new service with the same ISP.
They have an IP pool that is labelled as for one state (Victoria, Australia) but is also used for their services in Tasmania.
So now I have to fight every major website (Google, Amazon, Maxmind, etc) that does GeoIP lookups that I'm not in Victoria, I'm 500-800KM away.
Google was very confused for about 12 months because when I moved I also brought my wifi gear and so it would give me a precise location of my old address because it used wifi geolocation.
Comedically far.
Also, Britain isn't important enough to make this stick against e.g. an American.
If someone writes me a letter asking a question about material that is prohibited in his own country, that is not my problem. It is his responsibility to comply with local law and that of local government to seize material that is illegal there. They cannot deputize me to act, unpaid and without consent, on their behalf.
If the government of their country believes that accessing my website is a problem for their residents, then the onus is on them to sort it out on their own, without my involvement. They are perfectly capable of ordering ISPs that operate inside their borders to block my website from their customers.
The fact that Ofcom hasn't just done something like this in the case of SaSu, 4chan, etc., shows that they are not actually interested in "online safety"; they're making political statements and are trying to throw their weight around like the bullies they clearly are.
"Innocent"? That's a strange word to choose. Who cares what's "innocent"?
> It’s a choice, and has been the default for a long time, but it means one has chosen to speak outside the borders of their own country and that comes with rules, like them or not.
... or it means one has chosen to speak inside the borders of their country, and people outside those borders have chosen to import that speech. Web sites don't lob speech at you willy-nilly.
The bottom line is that that standard is impractical to implement, illiberal in its effects, and just generally a bad idea. For that matter, it's also at odds with most of the ways the world treats trade in physical goods.
I support the cause, but I don't think that's true. RIPE, the RIR responsible for UK, makes available a list of allocations per country. For UK:
https://stat.ripe.net/data/country-resource-list/data.json?resource=gb
WITH A RAP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ql6tGu9aWg
It's been exceedingly obvious but it's nice to know that Ofcom never thought that anyone would bother to fight back. This is clearly not about public safety but about controlling American corporations.
Parliamentary forces seem to be directly suborning this corruption.
There was never any chance that this would fly outside the country, least of all in the USA. Whoever gave Ofcom the extraterritorial power it has to pursue these goals clearly intended to ensure its failure, and for this I am grateful.
altogether, if you dont care about following this UK law, whats the need to carr what the UK government does? just dont go there or do business with people who care about the UK government. same as US sanctions and secondary sanctions. the UK at least is a small market
And more to the point, many US states passing or attempting to pass laws which aren't all that different to the UKs OSA. Mississippi's version is in some ways even more onerous to enforce as it requires social networks to age-check all of their users, not just those who want to access adult or "harmful" content. Bluesky notably went along with the OSA but considered Mississippi's demands to be over the line and geoblocked them instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_...
What's the point exactly? That some US states also did something similar re porn so therefore it's a nothingburger and we shouldn't care about this lawyers campaign to protect the internet from censorship?
A some point, if you do not have any relationship with the UK, go as far as blocking its residents but they still want you to abide by their law, aren't they just declaring war on the entire world?
This is something very deranged that have become very common with the world "becoming smaller": somes will go on a rampage for something happening on the other side of the planet. At the same time they will pretend not to notice that their own house in on fire.
Ofcom appears to agree that geoblocking UK residents would satisfy the requirements of this law. They also however appear to believe the OPs clients are simply lying about actually geoblocking UK residents - and Ofcom appear's to be the quasi-judicial entity which decides (at least as a first step).
I can't imagine OP's response to Ofcom that "we aren't doing that, but we won't explain what we were doing when we created the domain you think we created to do that" was particularly convincing.
> aren't they just declaring war on the entire world?
No, that would only happen if they started attempting to enforce the law by going into "the entire world" by force. Just declaring that some foreign entity broke your laws and owes you money and maybe that you'll arrest them if they come to your country isn't an act of war. Acts of war look like drone striking alleged drug smugglers in some other countries territorial waters without that other countries permission.
They don't seem to claim that. They claim the block is imperfect, and they demand perfection.
Since perfection is in fact impossible, that means there's no reasonable, actually available action you can take to keep them from fining you, or at least trying to.
In a nutshell, I'm moderately confident that this will suffice to keep Ofcom away.
A handful of my friends work in the adult industry. This policy is an absolute failure and it's punishing websites that actually tried to be better.
Russian (etc) businesses are spinning up porn sites that have no age verification, but equally do not care about the content or any kind of laws. No worries if the UK blocks them, it's easy to spin it up with a new domain. People will find it (and Google will surface it) because people want free porn. It's whack a mole, you can't win, and the content isn't policed.
I'd love to say how this passed is beyond me, but talking to anyone with no tech literacy it makes sense to them. In practice it's just driving people to places they should be. Or VPNs.
By testing from.. a single VPN IP?
And as noted in other comments here he doesn't seem to understand how geo ip databases are maintained. I sure won't be asking this guy to represent me anytime soon.
>What appears to have happened is that SaSu had a site mirror and that someone figured out a way to hit the mirror – which was also subject to the geoblock, something which took me under a minute to personally confirm – without using a VPN.
> If I had to guess, it’s that some NGO found some UK-based IP addresses which weren’t captured by the block because they weren’t properly geolocated.
Ofcom's clarified contention is that the geoblock is unreliable, while the lawyer seems to be rebutting the original statements that they interpreted Ofcom as claiming no geoblocking was active ('remains accessible to UK users', 'was directly available to people with UK IP addresses (with and without a VPN)').
Lawyer: "I've confirmed that at least one UK IP address is blocked."
Regulators: "We've confirmed that at least one UK IP address is not blocked."
In what world is the correct response "Dear regulators, you're incompetent. Pound sand." instead of "Can you share the IP address you used so my client can address this in their geoblock?"
Any world in which US citizens in the US aren’t subject to UK laws in any case.
That would imply that the client actually would like to be contacted every time Ofcom found a leak in the geoblock. Not a good idea imho.
The UK should pound sand.
If this is your view, do not travel or do business in other countries. It's simple.
based.
as someone from a country that had reached the bottom of many slippery slopes in less than ten years, it's very disheartening to see the West following us.
That has been happening for decades at this point. That doesn't make today's violations ok, but neither are they something new. The people of the USA gave up on freedom after 9/11.
Ofcom expects _you_ the foreign entity to implement geoblocking perfectly. And if not, they will try to fine you first before they even consider implementing blocking on their end.
That's the core issue here.
This has nothing to do with foreign entities circumventing UK based blocking and getting Ofcom letters for it.
Separate from the free speech debate, the international law part of this seems pretty cut and dry. Here's the bolded parts:
So, it appears, as with 4chan, Ofcom has elected to proceed with a mock execution... Ofcom is trying to set the precedent that... you have to follow its rules – even if you’re American and you’re engaged in constitutionally protected speech and conduct. To that end, Ofcom has renewed its previous threats of fines, arrest, and imprisonment, against SaSu and its operators – all Americans.
More pointedly: what is this lawyer actually "representing" these "clients" for? I don't see any mention of any US legal action, and presumably you need to be british to represent people in UK court. Isn't this just activism, not representation?
I really do think there should be a simple Cloudflare like services that ban all UK user as a form of protest. I say Cloudflare like and not Cloudflare because I am not sure if they are willing to risk supporting this feature.
I think that essentially this is probably the best way to do it, IF we must go down this route (and I think in some cases we probably have to).
Thank you
You're perfectly free to run these websites from the US. We just exercise our right to block these at our UK shores.
Where's the problem?
Edit: RIPE actually has documentation on this fallacy specifically https://docs.db.ripe.net/RPSL-Object-Types/Descriptions-of-P...
> “country:” – Officially Assigned two-letter ISO 3166 country code or "EU" (exceptionally reserved). It has never been specified what this country represents. It could be the location of the head office of a multi-national company, where the server centre is based, or the home of the End User. Therefore, it cannot be used in any reliable way to map IP addresses to countries.
No edge cases, it is a matter of law.
Let's, for analytical clarity, set aside the UK and examine Germany as an isolated datapoint.
AWS, for instance, possesses and operates the entirety of the 3.0.0.0/9 address space – a range distributed across numerous jurisdictions and continents. Notably, significant CIDR allocations from 3.0.0.0/9 reside within German territory, yet remain absent from the RIPE registry. Such inadvertent obfuscation undermines efforts at precise geolocation.
One may, through inference and correlation – specifically via https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json – arrive at a reasonably accurate estimation of the German CIDR's by aggregating address ranges tied to a designate AWS region they are associated with. Such inference is only feasible due to the vendor’s decision to publish such data. I would reasonably conjecture that other cloud providers engage in a comparable practice.
Thus, whilst it is not altogether impossible to ascertain the geolocation of a given IP address, the exercise remains contingent upon the discretionary transparency of global infrastructure operators and multiple indirect information sources – a rather fragile foundation upon which to build certainty.
This is likely why someone living in the UK was able to access one of the sites in question despite the geoIP-based ban.
To me, this looks like the culmination of many years of ad hoc censorship breeding cadre of favored censors. They've all grown into a system of expectations where they can just finger frustrating bits of counter-narrative and have it disappeared.
The Powers That Be don't care to hear pesky details about jurisdiction. As such, there is no one around with the temerity to point out the inherent absurdities. So they pursue "offenders" despite the obvious futility, because not doing so means explaining difficult things to people that will not listen.
As I recently wrote[1], there is no metaphysical certitude that Ofcom and its intentions will be forever futile: all that is necessary is for the political vectors to align optimally (as they inevitably will,) and the LEOs of the US would be happy to oblige.
Not exactly. On the surface, it's about kowtowing to pearl-clutching UK NGOs that are empowered by Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch's hysterical tabloids; and underneath, the real agenda is about restricting the influence of unsanctioned sites that could influence UK discourse - influence that established UK press barons (like the Murdochs, Lebedev, etc) want to keep very much to themselves.
The OSA is mostly supported by people who read The Guardian or The Times and watch the BBC. It was originally the work of academics (not big tabloid readers usually) like Lorna Woods, who is supposedly a professor of "internet law", a guy who is the founder of Ofcom, and Baroness Beeban Kidron. If you search Google News for their names you will find lots of left leaning broadsheets and not tabloids.
https://news.google.com/search?q=Beeban%20Kidron&hl=en-GB&gl...
The first five news sites for that search are: Financial Times, The Guardian, BBC, The Times, The Guardian again. Zero tabloids.
Is 4chan attempting to unfairly or unduly influence UK "discourse?" Or are they just _contributing_ to it as members of the public on an anonymous forum?
> Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch's hysterical tabloids
Which actually are an attempt to influence UK discourse. The framing errors are interesting.
I could see that last century. But do they even care about influence anymore? Isn't the money all they care about now?
With enormous damage to global society, I might add
The UK (nor the US) has no advantage in providing services, all it can do is demand that other people be prevented from providing them.
English became the language of international trade, of course, because we’re all just so adorably stupid, and our countries are tiny and harmless. Plus it is such an easy language to pick up…
Given that, shouldn't you be able to answer the question?
Capitalists need more growth and more returns now and since innovating, producing goods, and providing customer service costs money, we simply charge people a monthly fee to use their heated car seats.
This is what the brutal, messy end of capitalism looks like. Relentless self-cannibalization, burning billions of dollars tomorrow to make one cent today.
If nothing makes sense, that's because it doesn't. There is no logic or reason or planning involved. It's more money now, period. Consequences don't matter because we get more money right this second.
Capitalists are apparently unaware of what happens when they've extracted all possible money from the economy.
Pretty much avoid entering Britain or its dependencies or you'll be nabbed on a Commonwealth Warrant and extradited to England.
Now, granted, the US is a freer country than the UK is so that doesn't usually matter all that much, but all the US would need to do to nullify its 1A would be to simply permit the UK to enforce its claims of extraterritoriality in US-friendly airspace.
What speech they might be permitted to prosecute would naturally change based on administration.
a us person could travel to a country x and that x could send this us person to a UK prison? I don't know if doing so would be legal but when the rubber hits the road, each country x is technically sovereign and does not have to honor the first amendment of the US constitution.
So even if it might be frowned upon to extradite foreign (US) nationals in country X (such as Canada or India) to the UK, they could do it anyway to send a message?
Traveling is no joke. Americans often act like the world is their playground, but you are subject to the laws of the jurisdiction you're standing in. Traveller beware.
When it's a matter of drug charges or other obviously criminal activity, the US embassy and diplomats don't normally raise a fuss, but for something like this where the person made first amendment protected speech in the US? That'd definitely raise all kinds of hell.
Are they? Is all speech protected? If so, how do you prosecute people who leak secrets?
Yes
> Is all speech protected?
No
> how do you prosecute people who leak secrets?
See above
Who/what would defend a website in one place from stupidity in another place, were it not an enforced border between these places?
Or do you imply that the stupidity would not arise anywhere, if there were no borders?
This.
It's weird how it's not considered a basic human right to be able travel to where you want, and even live where you want as long as you can support yourself and comply with the local laws and customs.
And that's how it was for like 99% of the time that humans have existed.
When did keeping people locked inside "borders" even become a thing? I'm guessing post World War 1? Looking up history on Wikipedia says documents for "citizenship" existed maybe as far back as Ancient Egypt but there doesn't seem to be anything that forced people to remain within the nation of their birth.
The West literally bombed Japan and China to open their borders for "tRaDe" then pushed for strict borders after the world's worst wars that they started.
The "as long as you can" is exactly the reason. There is no way to ensure the travelers or migrants can (and want) to do that, if you don't have a border.
Eh, that literally is doing a lot of work. Where's evidence to this claim? And at what point did we bomb… checks notes, China?
Also keep in mind that “for like 99% of the time” people didn't move that much. People were very linked to their source of food, community, and what brought them stability. There isn't a lot of examples of 17-century travel influencers going around the world looking for The Best Places For Foodies.
Countries have tough challenges to contend with. Borders are arbitrary, yes, but we can't hand-wave them away now. What we can do is work together at the supra-national level.
It’s one thing to be talking about suicide or assisted suicide because you’ve decided it’s right for you and your situation.
It’s another to be dealing with depression from trauma, unable to get help and have no support system, and then be coerced by individuals on forums with ulterior motives.
I’m not saying I am in support of the UKs attempts, but it’s also not helpful to paint everything black and white on either side. Real solutions require dealing with the grays and the details.
edit: And for reference I have spoken to people in the later situations who have found all too many toxic individuals online who will say things like “you should definitely just kill yourself” in the midst of such situations, who after therapy consider those people to have been committing even more trauma (most likely because they get off on the control of another persons life, playing out murder fantasies etc, and who use the internets anonymity to further traumatize people at their most vulnerable)
What they cannot be allowed to do is tell organizations in other jurisdictions that they now suddenly fall under UK jurisdiction.
There are 195 countries in the world. If all of them followed a policy like UK's Ofcom, the internet would be gone in no time and world-wide user-to-user communication would become impossible for legal reasons. It's obviously not a sane position.
And that's what the site is for. They could improve by blocking all countries where there's free access to assisted suicide though.
> It’s another to be dealing with depression from trauma, unable to get help and have no support system, and then be coerced by individuals on forums with ulterior motives.
You've answered your own question. "And then" - exactly, THEN, not before. If they could get help, they would. But they can't so they end up there. If your alternative is that they should just suffer for years instead then I strongly disagree with this stance.
I remember one guy on a Polish forum announcing his plans which were stopped because someone called the police.. I kept checking his profile since then and it's clear that he continued to suffer and does to this day.. whoever thought that they "saved" him instead subjected him to literally years of suffering.
Maybe you consider it "Gubbbermenntt overreach" but I kind of consider suicide prevention as a reasonable function of state.
However, some random clicks on sasu found people who had been forum members for over a decade. Possibly not entirely mentally healthy - to be fair - but evidently still very much alive.
If the primary effect of participation was to increase the rate of suicide among its users, the forum would act as a sieve. While it might attract new members, the retention of long-term members (as observed) would be statistically improbable. The fact that a stable, long-term user base exists is evidence that for many, the forum serves a different function—likely as an outlet to manage and process ideation, not just to escalate it.
The state banning this outlet could, perversely, remove a coping mechanism and inadvertently have the opposite of the intended effect.
I put up my cat picture website but because the UK is a tiny and barely known country, I don't realise that this cat website would be breaching laws there.
My website gets popular and I receive a strongly worded legal letter from an entity in the UK claiming that they want to take me to court and fine me for providing this website to their citizens.
I am like: WTF? Just fucking block it from your perspective if you don't want your citizens to see it? And I seek legal advice from my lawyer who says: Well, they have no jurisdiction here, so you can ignore this letter, but if you want to minimise hassle, you could just geoblock the UK and hopefully they'll stop coming to you.
So I implement basic geoblocking, which works 99.99% of the time (at least when it comes to figuring out which country an IP is in).
The UK entity acknowledges this in a letter and tells me that this is a sufficient solution for now, but they'll keep watching me.
I go about my business, for some reason or another I make a mirror, which I also implement the geoblocking on, now proactively, because I don't want any more annoying letters from the UK.
Some time later, the UK entity sends another letter claiming they're continuing the proceedings because someone in the UK told them that they could still access my cat website and provided evidence. Within 10 minutes myself and my lawyer both use VPNs to verify the geoblock is still working, and we're confused.
We ask the UK entity WTF, and they say: We have evidence, the fact that it's clearly still working from _our_ perspective is irrelevant, I bet you just geoblocked our IP address.
What do you do in this case?
Jurisdiction? Don't you first have to commit the crime in the jurisdiction in question?
The two may negotiate over that, in which case common sense ideas like "they didn't do it in your territory" may make one side look foolish, which may in fact have a real influence over the outcome of the negotiations.
If they can't come to an agreement, then it may become a matter of whether the "offender" happens to travel somewhere where they can be grabbed. In the end, jurisdiction is about who has the power to enforce their laws. There's no universally-agreed-upon uber-legal system to make it otherwise.
But you're offering an online product, plus you are taking money from people from all over the world, whose governments have different regulations and points of view, your own business charges differently for different countries, and credit card providers are bound to different fees and/or extra charges for international transactions.
It's not a simple solution.
Uni students have been know to drive for a drink at the pub at the next Uni north (at the time) over the weekend for a lark. That's 2000km, one way.
A serious undertaking by Australian standards is a drive to Perth. That's 5000km in a straight line, but of course you can't drive in a straight line to Perth.
I met a guy once who was the last leg of circumnavigating Australia on his push bike. It had taken him years, and it looked like it. I've never seen someone so wirey, so obviously fit. Yet he rode at a slow measured pace. That was no doubt a habit forced by the trailer his bike towed. I guess the trip was around 15,000km.
I'm aware of that, it's become an increasing trend over the past 40 or so years as diplomatic norms have broken down, changed or become more disrespected. If it continues we'll see even more tit for tat reprisals as respect for international law and authority continues to break down (we're now 80 years on from WWII and the world has almost forgotten lessons learned and the international order that arose from that conflict).
"…have a need or desire to visit the UK at some point in the future, but can't, because there's some sort of legal judgment against them because of this."
I remember a time when my passport was stamped in big purple letters "Not Valid for XYZ" country for reasons like that (I could not legally leave the county if that was my destination).
Matters would likely come to a head if say US passports were stamped "Not Valid for the UK". Moreover, it's incumbent on a country to protect its citizens who have done nothing wrong by their laws—hence a country should so warn its citizens beforehand, and stamping passports with large signs is very effective.
This is all part of a much bigger issue too big to address here. It's why I believe it's going to get much worse before it gets better. As I said elsewhere, I believe that with the increase in political and cultural differences brought about by rising nationalism we will see an increase in geoblocking everywhere. I find the trends shocking but there's stuff-all I can do about them.
Edit: I must emphasize that whilst I'm defending the right of law abiding US citizens against action by other governments, I'm not defending the US Government per se (some of it's actions of late I consider alarming). Again, these are separate issues.
If I'm not afraid of violating NK law — because I'll never, ever be there — then the same logic holds for the laws of every other country I won't be visiting.
> In our email dated 13 October 2025, we explained that Ofcom would be taking steps to monitor the voluntary block of users with UK IP addresses implemented by sanctionedsuicide.site and sanctioned- suicide.net on 1 July 2025.
> Ofcom has become aware that the voluntary block in place on the above two websites restricting users with UK IP addresses from accessing these domains is no longer effective to restrict UK users from accessing the service or its content. In particular, we note that content from the service remains accessible to users with UK IP addresses at another domain, namely https://dignifiedexit.com.
This isn't a dispute about effectiveness, this a dispute about whether or not OP's client spun up another domain and didn't block UK users from it.
Your naivete is endearing. Every general-purpose public forum, these days, is heavily manipulated by bots.
Edit: that's not to say it isn't a valid strategy; NK has a big stability buff.
Internet but not for any other commerce. If you sell products to someone in the EU, you are liable to EU laws about that product category and commercial activity. The internet is the only exception, and that has caused a lot of problems.
IP block is the currently the only reasonable way to apply laws to internet based commerce. It has its flaws in accuracy; but ISPs could easily create a system to make them more reliable for IP lookup. Arguing that websites cannot be regulated outside of country of origin is an insane position to take with even the minimal level of hypothetical reasoning of what that would imply.
UKs laws are dumb, but they should be free to enforce them for websites operating in the UK. And websites should be able to leave the UK to avoid complying. This is a reasonable compromise that is already how both US and EU internet laws operate.
I don't know the state of play now, and I do know that things have gotten more that way over time. But the traditional approach to international product sales is that the importer is responsible. That originally meant the person who physically brought it into the country. As common carriers became more common, it meant the person who ordered the thing. That's occasionally been leavened by some consideration of whether the seller specifically targeted customers in the receiving country. And nowadays there's more of a tendency to start "blaming" sellers in some cases, probably because nowadays "importing" something is often a retail order from a specific consumer, as opposed to somebody bringing in a shipping container on spec to resell. Maybe some of those changes are appropriate, but it's just not true that physical goods have always been treated the way you want Web sites treated here, or even that they're mostly treated that way now.
> IP block is the currently the only reasonable way to apply laws to internet based commerce.
"IP block" works in both directions.
If you want to keep something out of your country, you should be responsible for blocking it, not the other way around. That's not necessarily easy, but it's less costly in total than demanding that every Web site enforce every country's regulation... and it has the advantage of putting the cost of a regulation on the people imposing it, which is where it belongs.
> It has its flaws in accuracy; but ISPs could easily create a system to make them more reliable for IP lookup.
From your use of the word "easily", I conclude that you personally would not be among those responsible for making that work.
> Arguing that websites cannot be regulated outside of country of origin is an insane position to take with even the minimal level of hypothetical reasoning of what that would imply.
First, you can in fact "regulate" by blocking, without trying to extend the reach of your laws outside of your border. Your claim that a regulator is left totally powerless is just false.
Second, in practice, that "hypothetical" is pretty close to what we have now, and even closer to what we had 10 years ago. The world did not end.
> UKs laws are dumb, but they should be free to enforce them for websites operating in the UK
Sure, as long as we recognize that "operating in the UK" properly means "is physically located in or controlled from the UK" and not "happens to be accessible to people in the UK". The latter definition would indeed be insane.
I am unaware of any prosecutions in this area.
https://ofac.treasury.gov/sanctions-programs-and-country-inf...
Is the strategy really just "get new federal laws passed so UK can't shove these regulations down our throats"? Is that going to happen on a timeline that makes sense for this specific case?
It seems like inside the US, this must be constitutionally protected speech anyway. I’m not 100% sure, but it would seem quite weird if the US could enter a treaty that requires us to enforce the laws of other countries in a way that is against our constitution. Of course the constitution doesn’t apply to the UK (something people just love to point out in these discussions), but it does apply to the US, which would be the one actually doing the enforcing, right?
Anyway, bumping something all the way up to the Supreme Court is a pain in the ass, so it may make sense to just pass a law to make it explicit.
>They’re definitely not treating it like a public safety matter, where they know how to reach us and know that I generally respond within the hour.
He's just pointing out that Ofcom's behavior is inconsistent with Ofcom sincerely believing it's a public safety matter either.
Geo-IP databases are mostly accurate, emphasis on mostly.
In the overwhelming majority of cases, mobile roaming traffic uses "home routing", not "local break-out". This means it is routed to the country where the user normally resides, not where they currently are. This means:
- For people visiting the UK (and potentially staying there for a long time, if on a permissive roaming plan), their IP address won't show up as UK despite long-term residence / citizenship.
- British people visiting other countries will still be subject to OSA, even when they should not be.
- People (including British people!) who buy British AirAlo SIMs may not get a British IP. AirAlo often uses SIMs registered in a different country than the one you're visiting, and the "exit node" (P-GW) may be located in a different country altogether. I suspect this last option will become quite attractive if VPN bans ever actually come into effect.
This is pretty much unfixable without major changes in how LTE roaming is conducted worldwide, and the UK isn't important enough to make that happen.
When I said legitimate that's what I was referring to, not simply "passed the bar".
Company A sells cryptocurrency in country A. Company B is a payment processor in country B. You in country A go to the country B merchant's website and enter your card info to buy something. Your card gets charged by company A to buy cryptocurrency, the merchant gets the money through company B and the transfer of cryptocurrency from company A to company B happens in software on a server somewhere and the user doesn't have to do anything.
Why is this either not happening or not sufficient?
We are building exactly this at Intercoin. I hate that most of crypto is zero-sum games. https://intercoin.org/currencies.pdf
Also Stripe is launching Tempo blockchain, USDC is launching Arc blockchain. Cool things are coming!
EDIT: I clicked on the PDF out of a sense of good faith interest and curiosity and I regret it. I hope you find something else to do.
But we're clearly far beyond that here.
"If country B doesn’t like it, block the mail in question". Saying only the country of origin can regulate activity done in another country creates a legal worm-bucket with vast implications. It's also not how laws work currently in pretty much any other sector than the internet.
IP block should be sufficient to void the laws; That's how other EU laws work. If the UK wants more than than then they should just create a firewall. But saying the internet should be a fully unregulated hellscape is not a sensible position here.
That’s actually how it works? Unless you have an extradition agreement, or military overmatch, or you are willing to expend some diplomatic leverage, you are typically not getting a citizen out of a foreign country. The government complains about this all the time with goods from SE Asia, and sometimes they seize fake designer goods and make a lot of noise about it. But the people making the knockoffs just keep on making them, don’t they?
Not sure I see how your logic has led you there. If a company (regardless of where they are headquartered) is operating in your country, then you necessarily have some sort of jurisdiction over it:
- If they are using servers or domain names hosted in your country, you can seize them.
- If they are making use of your country's financial system, you can ban them from that system.
- If they are shipping physical products to your country's residents, you can intercept those packages at customs.
- If any employees (or, better, officers) of that company are physically present in your country, you can fine or arrest them if they don't comply.
- If you have an extradition treaty with the country where they're operating, you can ask that country for help. If they decline, that's unfortunate for you, but that's life.
And right, in the end, if there's no "presence" aside from people in your country accessing foreign websites, then you can (given the right legal mechanisms) order ISPs in your country to block those sites. I don't see why any foreign-operated website should have any obligation to examine your laws and pro-actively block your residents from their site if needed; if you want your laws enforced on your residents, then... enforce them on your residents.
> But saying the internet should be a fully unregulated hellscape is not a sensible position here.
While I do see a few low-effort comments to that effect, I don't think that's a common opinion here. I don't even think the person you're replying to holds that opinion.
But this is the real issue. To what extent is a company "operating in" a country where it has no staff and no physical presence?
The principle that someone should become subject to the laws of a country they've never visited and where they have no assets just because they communicated with someone else who does live in that country seems questionable. Even if money is sent by the person living in that country to someone based elsewhere it still seems questionable.
Taken to their logical conclusion these kinds of arguments would kill off a lot of the value of the modern Internet (assuming they could be practically enforced). Can you even write a blog post any more if it might be controversial in any country in the world? Do you have to pay if you show ads next to that blog post and someone from the Sovereign Republic Of East Nowhere visits - but the Sovereign Republic Of East Nowhere has a law prohibiting online advertising as a social harm and imposing a fine of 1000% of global revenues generated through ads? What happens when the laws of two different countries are in direct conflict and one requires you to include an official warning of some kind alongside certain information on your blog but the other one prohibits such statements unless you're formally qualified to give advice in the field?
If you want to interfere with international trade or international communications at all then it makes far more sense practically - and arguably both morally and legally as well - to legislate so that your own people in your own country who are subject to your own laws are the ones who must or must not act in a certain way. If there's some kind of regulation on physical goods then make the person importing those goods responsible for compliance. If you want to tax international transactions then make the person in your country who is participating in those transactions responsible for declaring and paying the tax. But realistically this leads to a lot of non-compliance because your citizens don't have to be experts in international tax law so you can collect your $1.53 when they bought a new T-shirt from some online store based in another country and had it shipped.
What the UK is doing is claiming, without having dealt with this via treaty that I am somehow responsible for keeping their citizens off my website. This is not something they can actually do. Now if they made a deal with my country that said that I had to in some way we'd be in a different universe. But currently they do not.
As I, and probably many others, see it. If they don't want UK citizens visiting 4chan or whereever they should control the flow of data through their borders better and punish their citizens for data smuggling if they vpn their way around it. It's no different than prohibited goods like automatic weapons. If I send someone in the UK a fully automatic ak-47 (which is legal in my juristiction) then I suspect UK customs will catch it at the border and possibly jail, or at least have a stern talking to the recipient.
The only further question would be if the country is friendly enough with the UK to extradite.
Or maybe China, for a US citizen who posted while on US soil, in a US website? https://www.reuters.com/world/exclusive-american-barred-leav...
Seems a little inconsistent, this delivery of Democracy.
This is a narrative. Reality is something else. These stats are from June of last year; by that point, Farage (leader of a party with barely an MP for most of the past decade) had been invited more often than SNP leader Alex Salmond, who was literally in power and ruling over dozens of MPs. https://theconversation.com/bbc-question-time-analysis-of-gu...
That's what happens when you respond to a request after all. (Up to very minor nits, e.g. you might be paying a cloud provider instead of an ISP).
Governments that expect some content or other blocked can damn well do it themselves, in their own legal system. They cannot compel someone else to spend his time, talent, or treasure to enforce their petty rules.
If they go after one of their own for requesting something from me, whatever. If they block me, whatever. I suppose they're within their rights to do that.
The federal government "deputizing" or trying to chill private actors out of speech, out of doing business, etc. is a violation of Americans' first amendment rights; so held SCOTUS last year. No way in h--- are we letting some tinpot foreigner do so.
What you are describing is exactly what is going on here. OFCAM’s final action, if taken, is blocking at ISP level. All of the legal stuff is happening in the UK system.
I’m just sort of curious for your thoughts after learning that.
(Also, I’m curious about the SCOTUS decision, I.e. which one? I used to be a law nerd and got a kick out of reading oral arguments for the first time in years this week, would appreciate more material)
Governments can do whatever they damn well please in their own territory. Including arresting you if you ever visit because you violated some law that they wrote that applies to people in the rest of the world, or even you violated some law that a friend of theirs (i.e. a country with an extradition treaty) wrote to apply to people in the rest of the world. If those actions compel people to spend their time, talent, or treasure to enforce their petty rules then they can do that.
Whatever "actively reaching out" standard you are imagining doesn't exist in the first place. Even if it did though, you clearly violated it when you sent the reply to the request actively aware that it could go across borders.
SCOTUS (with an emphasis on the US) decisions seem rather irrelevant to non-US actors.
The network infrastructure is the thing that is performing the delivery that is actively reaching across borders. Not the webserver.
The entire HN submission is full of people saying that it is the UK networks responsibility to make sure that their laws are upheld and that anything happening inside US borders is simply people going above and beyond in assisting the UK in the pursuit of the enforcement of its laws. The geoblocks on the side of the webserver are a form of optional assistance and a sign of goodwill.
Meanwhile Ofcom seems to be of the opinion that this isn't enough yet they simultaneously do nothing about the violators physically located in the UK. This means they are going out of their way to make an unenforceable and impossible to implement law so that they can manufacture probable cause.
Website operators can give the UK a list of IPs to block, which would make it very easy for the UK to enforce their own laws even against VPNs, but it is only the UK that is capable of doing that, and they are shirking their responsibility onto those who can't do it on their behalf.
Second, where is the person writing the letter from? Mars? They're going to have a hard time finding a place where kidnapping and extortion are legal.
Third, the letter would in fact presumably be aimed at a specific person in a specific country... as would the kidnapping.
The company could be from china or Russia with little interest in diplomatic pandering for such a small incident.
Providing a user a service in exchange for payment is also aimed at a specific person in a specific country.
heck, if no laws can be applied across borders, it could be a website selling the service of fake extortion letters.
And don't mix up "difficult to enforce" with "legal". Constantly changing domains and hiding who is behind the service are efforts to avoid being caught by very real and enforced laws.
This is honestly disgusting and exactly the problem. You don’t know why they couldn’t get help. There are many possible reasons and instead they should be continued to be encouraged to find proper mental health counseling, not feed into a mental health crisis talking about suicide.
And it’s not your place to decide what is suffering or not for them. That is exactly the problem. The fact that you checked on this persons profile and decided based on that he’s continuing to suffer is exactly the issue. You are not a trained mental health provider I’m sure. Encouraging someone in that place to commit suicide is exactly the problem. You are not a soothsayer who can see into this persons future. What if in 10 years that person has a child and finds true joy and meaning, glad that they went through what they did in the previous years. There are many such cases.
It’s also not your job to somehow “ease suffering” for a person on the internet you don’t know, with some kind of self satisfaction and sense of control over another’s life that you took away an individual’s suffering by helping them kill themselves.
Instead the person needs to decide for themselves, by themselves, AND they need to be in a healthy mental state to make that decision. Depression is not a healthy mental state, it’s a period of delusion.
Your comment only proves exactly why sites such as this need massive regulation, and anyone who knows someone who contemplates suicide and came out the other side living a fulfilling life with joy and happiness would understand exactly why.
And I could agree that a site talking about assisted suicide is a net positive, but the burden is on that site to ensure it is not encouraging people in mental health crisis to suicide. In an open, mostly unmoderated forum that is a very high bar indeed, and it's even higher when the company hosting such a site has a profit motive. Trained mental health providers should be available and reviewing discussions in those situations, and such regulation requiring that is in my opinion not a hinderance on free speech.
And for anyone reading these comments and suffering with depression, if you’re unable to find good mental health care, first and the very least read the following book, and know that there are people who can help you find the light on the other side:
https://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-New-Mood-Therapy/dp/0380...
There are many possible reasons, that's why they should be PROVIDED with help, not "encouraged to somehow find it" as if they didn't know that something was wrong already..
> And it’s not your place to decide what is suffering or not for them. That is exactly the problem. The fact that you checked on this persons profile and decided based on that he’s continuing to suffer is exactly the issue.
It's not my place to decide, but it's THEIR place to decide. I don't need to be a trained mental health provider to see that that person is TELLING the world that they suffer, posting and interacting with other people who also suffer.
> You are not a trained mental health provider I’m sure.
No, but I am the person who used to suffer, and that makes me more qualified to talk about these problems than a trained+qualified+certified+award-winning "mental health provider" (which.. did not help me btw, others from the community did).
> Encouraging someone in that place to commit suicide is exactly the problem
I'm not encouraging anybody to commit suicide.. where did you even get this idea? My stance is to not prohibit that last resort solution.
> What if in 10 years that person has a child and finds true joy and meaning, glad that they went through what they did in the previous years. There are many such cases.
It doesn't delete these 10 years of suffering which you apparently see no problem subjecting people to. It was his decision and that decision was not respected. Should it not be interrupted, that person would not suffer ever again and we'd not need to have this discussion.
> with some kind of self satisfaction and sense of control over another’s life that you took away an individual’s suffering by helping them kill themselves.
I did NOT encourage them to do that. It was their decision and it was interrupted. The people who interrupted that have that "self satisfaction", I see things as they are. Those people didn't care about that person at all, just called the police and forgot about him. It's not that they could pay his bills or anything, they didn't care.
> AND they need to be in a healthy mental state to make that decision. Depression is not a healthy mental state, it’s a period of delusion.
Disagree, if someone decides that it's enough suffering for them, that decision should be honored. If you can't cure that person instantly, prolonging this "unhealthy state" is what I'm against.
> and anyone who knows someone who contemplates suicide and came out the other side living a fulfilling life with joy and happiness would understand exactly why.
Nothing bad would happen to that person should they not be interrupted. This search for "joy and happiness" is absurd and it blinds you so that you accept that you might subject someone to literally years of suffering.
Doing no harm is a high bar, and that bar requires commitment that online communities and the companies that run them almost certainly cant provide without a lot of effort. The disregard for the possibility that those communities may have caused harm (even if you believe they helped you) is alarming.
> This search for "joy and happiness" is absurd
This is the problem when people with this viewpoint get together in forums, it can create a vicious feedback cycle that are not healthy for anyone.
I'm sorry you are suffering or have suffered. But searching and finding joy and happiness is not absurd. We only have one life to live, and it definitely doesn't need to be suffering. Every one of us has the power to change that (believing you cant is a thought trap, a type of delusion.)
> Nothing bad would happen to that person should they not be interrupted
This speaks volumes. You are saying that the death of a person is nothing bad. A life.. a loved one. A child going through a momentary suffering. That death is BAD. Not understanding that is delusional thinking.
> It doesn't delete these 10 years of suffering which you apparently see no problem subjecting people to
I'm not subjecting them to anything, nor are you by not talking or telling a person how to commit suicide. That persons suffering is not your or my responsibility. But the moment you do talk to that person about how they could commit suicide, then you have taken on a responsibility. And it is an immense one, not to be taken lightly.
Finally I'll say this, all your comments indicate to me someone who is suffering from depression. If you truly believe that not to be the case, I challenge you to read the following book cover to cover, do all the exercises, and once you have finished, look back on your words and ideas and see if you may have been stuck in some delusional thinking:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0380731762?ref_=cm_sw_r_ffobk_cp_u...
And finally, if you ever actually consider suicide, I urge you to question your thinking and consider the possibility you could make a choice that in another mindset you would regret. Imagine getting high on shrooms or LSD and jumping off a roof. Depression is like that... when you come to, you realize you were just on a bad trip.
And as my favorite Starship captain says... "Never give up. Never surrender!"
Plenty of US citizens would actively cheer the notion of having a foreign government arrest their political opponents as an end-run around the fact they're not allowed to do it at home.
After all, 1A/"freeze peach" laws should only protect you from your government, right?
I'm not convinced that plenty of US citizens would celebrate a foreign government arresting an American for what would be protected by the 1A in the US. There will always be trolls, of course.
> After all, 1A/"freeze peach" laws should only protect you from your government, right?
If my government has the longest dick of all governments in the world, and knows how to swing it, I'm not so sure.
So no, I don't think that the people who celebrated that would care, and said people would actively support an administration that actively encouraged the UK in this manner for the same reason.
Do you have evidence for that? Because when I search I do see them doing investigations concerned with abuse of people including mentioning coercive and controlling behaviors
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...
> If all of them followed a policy like UK's Ofcom, the internet would be gone in no time and world-wide user-to-user communication would become impossible for legal reasons.
Sounds like a slippery slope fallacy to me. Again, not necessarily supporting the policy, but when such arguments are used against it, it’s not convincing.
Let me put it another way: Would you comply with a similar letter from North Korea? From Russia? From China? If not, your attitude is hypocritical and inconsistent.
We're taking those threat seriously and have decided to block all UK IP numbers and not to do business with the UK for the time being. News that Ofcom might ignore such measures are worrying to us.
And here’s why your argument is a fallacy:
“This type of argument is sometimes used as a form of fearmongering in which the probable consequences of a given action are exaggerated in an attempt to scare the audience” [1]
Well not just the UK, but the comment you are replying to is about the UK.
> Seems a little inconsistent, this delivery of Democracy.
Ya. Also not a claim that the comment is countering. As a reminder of where you are in the thread, we are talking about the UK.
> It is the firm will of the Irish nation, in harmony and friendship, to unite all the people who share the territory of the island of Ireland, in all the diversity of their identities and traditions, recognising that a united Ireland shall be brought about only by peaceful means with the consent of a majority of the people, democratically expressed, in both jurisdictions in the island. Until then, the laws enacted by the Parliament established by this Constitution shall have the like area and extent of application as the laws enacted by the Parliament that existed immediately before the coming into operation of this Constitution.
(Which means the territory of what is now called the Republic of Ireland, that is, explicitly excluding any claim to Northern Ireland in order to comply with the Good Friday agreement)
They now seem to have backtracked on that and are using either the country the request came from or the country the account was set up from (both using IP geolocation)
Perhaps "Extraterritorial regulation" is bad wording. A country can regulate whether an extraterritorial website is distributed and or viewed within its borders but it has no legal authority force another country to close down a website that's operating legally within its jurisdiction.
The only remaining options are diplomatic action—request the site be taken down or war/by force. Whether we like it or not the only practical action is for a country to geoblock offensive websites at its borders.
Sadly, given the current state of world affairs, it seems to me geoblocking will become the norm almost everywhere.
The issue is they're doing this through might makes right rather than jurisdictional authority.
You have a website in one country, 99% of the content is legal in another country but it also contains a post by a user which is legal in the first country and not the second.
The second country then demands that the website remove the post -- for everyone, they don't even want it accessible via VPN -- or they'll have their ISPs block not just the entire website but also the entire shared hosting provider the website uses. The site which is entirely in the other jurisdiction can't withstand that much pressure and removes the post.
You now have a country censoring a post world-wide because they leveraged every company within their jurisdiction to enforce a law against one that isn't. That's extraterritorial regulation.
Hopefully this will break up the cartel of websites/distributors back into a decentralised web eventually.
By the way, I've worked closely together with argumentation theorists at university for many years, so I know quite well what a slippery slope argument is. You should know that not all of them are fallacies.
Murthy v. Missouri was generally a loss; 6-3 with Justice Barrett for the majority ruling states lacked standing, which is consistent with the Roberts court's informal policy of dodging. Alito dissented, joined by Thomas and I think Gorsuch, and that is worth a read. The more important one was NRA v. Vullo, a unanimous opinion from Sotomayor. Gorsuch wrote a concurrence as did I believe one other justice.
I think you're looking at it the wrong way. I'm not thinking about that at all. I do not care about that at all. I am not beholden to the laws of any other nation when I operate my website[0]. I don't care about "reaching out across borders". I don't event know the geographical origin of requests that hit my server, because I don't care, and I have no need or desire to hook up some sort of (error-prone) geoIP database to my logs in order to categorize requests. Once the HTTP response packets leave my server and hit the first router hop, I have no knowledge or interest in where they end up after that.
> SCOTUS (with an emphasis on the US) decisions seem rather irrelevant to non-US actors.
Not sure why you're bringing that up, as GP didn't mention SCOTUS at all. But as a US citizen and resident, SCOTUS' rulings are all that matter to me when it comes to what I personally do while at home. If SCOTUS says the content on my website is legal based on US law, then I don't really care whether or not it's legal in other countries[0, again], and I shouldn't really have to; life is too short to have to worry about that sort of thing.
[0] Sure, I agree with you that this could be a problem for me if I do break any of their laws, and then later decide I want to visit that country. It could also be a problem if that country has an extradition treaty with mine, and my country is for some reason incentivized to give me up.
The US will not enforce UK judgements or fines if enforcing them is contrary to the US' own laws, including its Constitution. SCOTUS ultimately decides when that's the case.
So it's really, really relevant to whether a non-US actor like Ofcom can actually collect fines from people inside the US. That's a separate question from what the UK government can do to people from the US who actually enter the UK, and an important one.
If I were a UK citizen or resident, I'd probably be pretty pissed off that Ofcom was wasting money and resources on battles they are going to lose. Well, I suppose, since Ofcom is funded in large part by the UK-based businesses it regulates, if I were an officer, employee, or shareholder of one of those companies, I'd be pissed that they're wasting money paid by my company to fund them.
And even though Ofcom is not directly a UK government agency, there are certainly political costs to tilting at windmills for the UK government.
As mentioned in my previous reply, this isn't how the internet works. There is no teleportation or ICBM delivering the packets. There is infrastructure spanning borders and the infrastructure is the thing that is ignoring the laws. The infrastructure has accurate geographic knowledge about the physical connections. The webserver doesn't have that information at all and must infer it. From the perspective of the webserver, the physical world might not exist at all. There is no such thing that can be described as awareness from the website operators perspective. IP addresses do not encode geographic information. The entire point of the OSI layer model is that the higher layers know nothing about the lower layers nor do they know anything about the physical location of the nodes.
Again, only the operator of the network has that information and the operator is located inside the UK. It is those network operators in the UK that are wilfully ignorant and aware of the things you claim a website operator from a far away country should be aware of.
Just think about how ridiculous your comment is if you sued someone in the US from the UK and brought up their awareness. How would you prove that they knew the location of every single router and fiber cable the packets are traveling through? That's what you're arguing here. You're arguing that there is full and complete awareness.
The US has asserted that right globally for quite some time, and literally threatened force against other countries to get them to actively support (not merely tacitly permit) such enforcement, even when it directly violated the constitutions of the countries involved (as well as simply doing armed enforcement without consent of the government iinvolved in other cases.)
This has been particularly notable since the outset of the “Global War on Terror”, but didn’t start there (it was a big part of US counter-narcotics policy long before the GWoT.)
Yeah about that …
Try looking up Gary McKinnon or Larry Love. The US has a history of this stuff, those are just a couple of examples. Hell, Kim Dotcom (NZ but same deal).
And that’s before we get into whatever the f*ck was happening at Guantanamo Bay.
> I know of no government that thinks it can enforce their law outside of their borders against foreigners.
Then you haven’t been paying attention.
The USA does this quite regularly. Look at FATCA as one example.
The problem here is that some twits did something like this once and since then everyone is saying "but look, they're doing it, why shouldn't we?" when they ought to be saying "we're all going to be imposing sanctions on that country until they stop doing that".
If someone is doing something, that's precedent -- but the precedent can either be "someone who does that can get away with it" or "someone who does that is not going to get away with it". And when making the decision, think through the consequences of everybody doing it to you if you allow it to be the first one.
The whims of its god-emperor/president. A lot of the enforcement is against US law.
I hold Russia as a whole accountable for Russia's recent war in Ukraine, it's their Responsibility to get rid of their leader when he started an unjustified invasion.
I hold the U.S. as a whole responsible for their successive presidents antics.
Like the US did with Swiss banks?
“…the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.” — Thucydides, 5.89 (trans. Rex Warner, Penguin Classics edition)
(half-remembered quote found using AI)
original source https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/History_of_the_Peloponnesian_...
Book 5, end of paragraph 89
The USA has been doing this for a long time e.g. Wikileaks and Julian Assange, Kim Dotcom etc.
Really, not a single one? Like, a really big obvious one? LOL!
The main issue is that few countries respect freedom of speech on principle and even that group has edge cases.
Imagine that your own country finds out that you were a prolific serial killer while on a holiday in another country. Do you think they will just ignore it?
This is country B considering something a citizen of country A did while in country A to be a crime. And not that it even matters but in country A that thing is legal. Like country B is a sovereign state and can arrest you for whatever it wants while you're there but the bigger question is whether country A should be mad about it and impress themselves on country B to get them to not do that.
That's really the issue here and exactly what the GRANITE Act he's proposing does.
It seems like the US is actually being too nice here. It's a perfectly reasonable position to reject the notion that a country has global jurisdiction and to consider such an arrest to be a hostile act against the US. I would be pissed the moment a country thought it could punish one of my citizens for something they did while under my jurisdiction—even something that I consider to be illegal.
E.g. if I involuntarily swing my arm and hit someone in the face as a result of a medical condition I lacked the appropriate mens rea and am not guilty. If I intentionally punch someone in the face while being somehow unaware that I'm not allowed to do that I am guilty.
Hard to see how mens rea would save anyone from being guilty here.
Anti-blasphemy laws, which is what these laws are, don't care about that either.
Or imagine that country X with age of consent of 18 would find out that the citizen of country X while home, married 8yo child and impregnated her.
It's the same principle. So there is nothing special about extending jurisdiction beyond your own borders.
The issue in this case is that Freedom of Speech is such a fundamental right, that it should not be forbidden anywhere in the world. Sadly, it is forbidden in most Western countries, let alone developing.
They weren't arguing for anyone's right to be corrupt in the first place though. If US citizens really have to pay extra taxes and have arduous reporting requirements then so be it, but why is the rest of the world dragged into that mess? This isn't a "dirty banks" issue; it's nearly impossible to get a bank account at any reputable institution as a US citizen abroad just because of the PITA of the reporting requirements. It's a mediocre law from questionable authority.
Another example is that e.g. AWS Europe, even if every single one of its employees, board and what have it are all Germans, are still compelled to hand over their data if Amazon US is the parent company, under the likes of the CLOUD Act or FISA. That's a foreign entity comprised of foreign citizens and concerns the assets (data) of foreign citizens.
Sadly a lot of Americans hear "foreign bank account" and immediately think "tax evasion" without realizing there are a lot of ordinary Americans overseas who just want to pay the rent and save for retirement but can't because Uncle Sam follows us wherever we go for life.
Just one example: https://help.revolut.com/help/wealth/stocks/licences-regulat...